Bloggin’ Like a Blogger

Written by Hunter Jansen on August 5, 2014

Alright - so this is the first post that I’m writing using Github pages powered by Jekyll. I’ve got to say that it’s
pretty neat being able to write, edit and host all the contents of everything via github. And the ability to write in markdown
flavour is pretty nice to - Much like one of my more recent dabblings, Ghost.

That said, there’s a lot of things that Ghost can do that the set up using Ghost/Jekyll can’t - the same can be said vice versa.

Points in favour for ghost:

The inherently minimal design of Ghost is in my opinion, beautiful - but can be attained through proper styling anywhere

The editor and live preview panels in Ghost are awesome, especially for those who don’t know markdown inside and out

Very popular right now in the js world

Points in favour for the Github/Jekyll set up:

You don’t need to maintain an entire environment - it’s all hosted and staged on github

You can easily plan site wide updates without an continuous integration set up

You can write posts anywhere (on your local version, or in the editor right on github)

Saves the cost of a blog domain (or any other)

Is a part of your github so others can easily find it :p

Can easily integrate front end frameworks like bootstrap & foundation

Comes with a built in hook for Google Analytics

Easy to add additional pages for other topics (So I’ll have one for programming jazz and one for whatever fitness thing I’m currently on,
and another for gaming and another for rants or whatever)

I think for now I’m going to be sticking with blogging on github and freeing up my blog server for other play projects. I was
facing issues with pathing and domain routing with ghost on my server that will essentially disappear with my blog going on Jekyll here, too.

The basic preview problem is not really an issue for me, as intellij idea (which I more or less use on every project) has a plug in that has
a side by side preview.

Soooo, I suppose I’ll probably be moving whatever content I feel like keeping over from ghost sometime soon.

At this point I don’t really have any major issues with this set up, but I’ll be sure to mention any should they come to light.